


Through Faith

by de_Clare



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Boston, Drag Balls, Gen, Genderqueer, MTF Faith, New York City, Pentacostal Church, Pre-Canon, Trans, Trans Character, Trans Faith, Trans Female Character, Transgender, heshers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-22
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-16 13:27:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4626948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/de_Clare/pseuds/de_Clare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A gender nonconforming boy is called to be the slayer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through Faith

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Trigger warning for homophobic verbiage and blurring of pronouns. There is also exploration of the intersection between race, class and gender which I hope represents but doesn't espouse inequalities.

“For by grace are ye saved through faith,” Pastor Perez admonishes in English from a black-covered King James Bible. He’s worked up a red-faced sweat with one hand in the air, beseeching the spirit to save them from addictions: drugs, alcohol, homosexuality. Gee, which one of these things is not like the other?

Shane leans forward in his tilted white plastic chair making the legs crash to the cement floor, which causes Pastor P to give him the stink-eye. He’s always hated church, especially this dive. It’s a storefront gig in a Mexicano neighborhood where born-again washed-up bikers throw up their hands like maniacs when they feel the spirit moving. And the slow and sloppy electric guitarist is a doughy-eyed permafried fifteen-year-old who took up cough medicine when his parents started piss testing. The praise music swells and the congregation starts ululating in tongues, so Shane plays his favorite game. He whispers “fuck” at a gradually increasing volume until someone hears. “Ow,” his mom pinches his arm between her yellowey shellacked talons and Shane shuts up. Bitch. They only come to the Iglesia De Dios Pentecostal because Mom is banging the drummer, a twenty-three year old named Chili with faded green Mexican Mafia tattoos and a too-tight shiny red polyester shirt stretched over his sweaty belly, ready to pop buttons straight into the pastor’s beady eyes.

Chili likes to hang out in the kitchen in a wife-beater and fake gold cross, sweating and ordering Shane around with the sweet pet name maricón—or faggot, for those who learned Spanish with lisps in a private school. Oh yeah, Shane is a faggot. A faggot who builds engines and resells old machine guts like a gypsy. One day, two kids tried to jump him after school. He’d beat the shit out of them both and said, “What’s it like to get beat up by a faggot?” Shane had always been freakishly strong, but thin and feminine, which is perfect for looking bomb without getting the shit kicked out of him. He could make a sausage roll like Chili cry, but Mom’s all over him and if Shane pisses her off, she’ll cut off his hormone supply again. His mom, an old hesher with orangey highlights and loose skin from a gastric bypass, glares at him with that weak menace. Mom was nice when she was fat. They’d have BJ nights on Fridays, splurging a whole day’s food stamps on Ben & Jerry’s half-baked ice cream and watching Lifetime movies about women throwing their abusers in prison. But now all that mom eats is box wine and she’s a hot mess.

The deacons pass around steel trays with little dixie cups of water. Shane misses the Catholic mass Grandma J used to take him to. At least they had real booze and Father Cusmas, the German Domican who ran the parish, took the poor kids to camp and didn’t molest them. The service closes with the twelfth worship song, and Shane just thinks about how the stolen panties feel against his clit. 

Shane has saved some cash from slinging hash, so after the service he catches the train to New York. He loves the clubs and the guys aren’t all macho Bro-rish like in Boston. He’s dressed in his mom’s old hesher cut off Motley Crue t-shirt and workout shorts pulled up to the midriff. He used to rock the bangs in the eyes and miles of wavy brown down to his waistband, but some whackjob shrink told his mom to buzz it off. It’s grown back to his earlobes, so he just said “fuck it” and does it up shock straight with aquanet and a bandana. 

He’d tried to get in on the New York house scene, but the girls were kinda stuck-up. Well, that is until they realized he could take out five would-be hate crimers without making even cheap mascara run. Their house mother, Pollo, a formidable six-foot Latina lady with neck tattoos, asked him, “Girl, are you a ninja or something? You just kicked the shit out of five guys and I bet you could take out five-by-five.” And somehow it stuck. With Pollo’s help, Shane tried the drag ball scene where he learned some great tips about padding his skinny thighs and ass, but being around other tall women with hard bodies just made him feel more like a freak.

Wanting to avoid the other girls, he decides to hit the clubs. They only card where the tourists go, so he dances at dives with straight dudes who either don’t notice or don’t care that he has a dick.

Tonight though, he gets cocky. Out in the alleyway, he’s making out with some grabby day-trader type who paws his balls and flips out. The guy looks like he’ll just barf right there, so Shane laughs…that is until the dude pulls out a gun and Shane sees that he’s shaking from a cocaine down. Shane is faster by far, but the guy has stepped out of reach and if Shane tries to grab the gun he’d be just as likely to set off that trembling trigger finger and get one in the guts. Remembering the words from church, “by grace are ye saved by Faith” he prays that he won’t die with a seven-inch clit hanging between his legs. 

The shot makes his ears ring and he’s too shocked to feel the bullet and hopes it won’t be his head that starts trickling blood. But the dude just boom-downs like a sack of potatoes moaning, which at least means he’s alive. Shane turns around in time to see a classy Indian woman replacing something high-powered into a leather briefcase. 

“We haven’t much time,” the woman warns in a tight British accent. Somehow the businesslike tone sounds more brutal in that prim voice. “I’m looking for a young woman—“ The open-ended statement leaves it to Shane to decide how to proceed.

“Name’s Faith,” she says, and sticks out a hand that suddenly feels filthy with the bleeding guy. 

“Priya.” The woman shakes Faith’s hand assertively. She likes a lady who’s not afraid to get her hands dirty.

Priya leads Faith into the back of a—no shit—idling black sedan parked outside the alley. 

When they’re ensconced inside and the driver glides down the street—funny, Faith had imagined tires screeching—Priya admonishes, “You could have easily overwhelmed that man, or five.”

“Or five by five,” Faith answers distractedly, looking down at the dark water under the Manhattan bridge thinking about gods who save people with killers in killer heels.


End file.
